I’d like to place a few small speaker devices around the house and have them play announcements and audio feedback. Like one sound for ok, one for error, doorbell and so on. I’ve asked around and researched on this forum and elsewhere, but most discussions about audio playback focus on how to listen to music around the house. All good with that, but high quality music playback is less important for now.
I don’t have any experience with esp32 and esphome. While I have technical background, I’m hoping to find some SDK based solution that is a little removed from the metal, because of time constraints (family etc). I’d be OK with writing some integration code.
I have been recommended the m5stack’s ATOM Echo Smart Speaker Development Kit, which fits the bill in terms of size and features.
Question: Does anyone have experience with this and can share their experience about how well it integrated with HA / esphome and also how much work was needed to get it functional?
As an additional note, for most flexibility, I’d like to create a solution where HA initiates playback of an audio file that resides on the server.
Thanks!
I use M5Stack Atoms for Bluetooth proxies and the results have been great. Haven’t used them as speakers, but I can make a couple of general comments:
- They’re very small - about 2cm square - so I don’t know what sound quality/volume are like. Someone else will be able to comment on that.
- Home Assistant does not pair with Bluetooth speakers. There may be some special ESPHome integration, but there are a number of forum threads on the subject, so I suspect not.
- ESPHome is a well-established part of HA. A bit more hands on than other areas, so expect some tinkering (I think you’ll have to flash the Atom for example), but there’s lots of help available here.
- On the plus side, M5Stack Atoms are really cheap, so there’s no harm in getting one to try it out.
Playing announcements from a file is very straightforward - you just save the speech as MP3 and tell a media player entity to play it, as you would a music track. There are lots of websites that will let you record and download speech as MP3 - I use Elevenlabs who have a great range of natural-sounding voices.
If you already have integrated speakers for music, you might consider using those. I have Sonos, which use wi-fi and have a good HA integration.
Thank you for the prompt response!
Yeah, I’d be very curious hear someones experience with that. I don’t expect much in terms of loudness or quality, but hopefully good enough for a janky doorbell 
I believe the ATOM is wifi enabled, so I’m assuming HA can communicate with it that way.
Flashing, some yaml and maybe some integration code are all fine by me. Copying bits in an array or some such, not so much. Again, we just have a lot going on, so would prefer working on some “middle layer and up”.
I’m definitely excited to get some hands on experience with esphome, I think there are some fun projects ahead with that.
Yeah, it’s not so much the price that is my concern. My post was more to get some input on whether I’m barking up the wrong tree or not, so I won’t waste time. 
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